LG’s Latest OLED TV Might as Well Be Wallpaper

Here’s what LG is doing with all those bendable OLED panels!

If there was any doubt about which company was going to rule TVs at CES 2017, it’s gone. LG has announced their 2017 line of TVs, and it’s headlined by the W7 Signature — the flexible OLED panel is so thin (thinner than any smartphone), it can only be mounted (looks more like affixed) to the wall, and it’s available in up to 77″.

There is one big caveat. Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of super-thin TVs that get wider at the bottom half to hold the television’s processing and power hardware. To get around that, LG has put that hardware in a soundbar, meaning that the soundbar must be used with the TV — if you’re planning to put together a surround sound system, plan on building it around that. Fortunately, it has side- and front-firing speakers with Dolby Atmos processing, so it won’t drag down a good system too much.

LG’s 2017 4K OLED TVs now cover 99 percent of the DCI color spectrum and are capable of 1,000 nits of brightness. There’s also Dolby Vision or Active HDR (LG’s dynamic HDR version of Dolby Vision), so there’s not much to want for. One big change is that LG has decided not to make any curved sets this year, in keeping with the general trend at CES 2017 to move on from curved. Their flat OLED lineup includes B7, C7, E7, G7, and W7 models going from 55″ to 77″.

LG will improve their LED TV selection with their new Super UHD units, which uses a nano cell film instead of the quantum dots Samsung uses. LG says nano cell film enables deeper blacks and a wider viewing angle while preserving color performance compared to quantum dot, but that’s probably not in comparison to the metal-core quantum dot TVs Samsung debuted at CES this week. The Super UHD TVs range from 43″ to 86″, and the higher-end sets will have Dolby Vision (the lower ones will at least be HDR-ready). The smart TVs in this and the OLED lineup will run an updated version of webOS — LG says the interface hasn’t changed much, but it should be easier to control and explore.

No word on exact pricing or availability for these sets yet, but we’re sure we’ll hear more throughout the year.